


Honesty

by queerhazeleyes



Series: Tumblr Drabbles [7]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Drabble, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-20
Updated: 2014-11-20
Packaged: 2018-02-26 08:57:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2645942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queerhazeleyes/pseuds/queerhazeleyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If he were being honest with himself—something Chuck made a point of avoiding—he would have to admit he never expected to live to twenty-one. It was a fact of life for a Jaeger pilot, especially when you start as young as Chuck did: you clock a few good years, get some Kaiju kills under your belt, and go out with a bang. The fact that he’d lasted as long as he had was worth bragging about. And brag Chuck did. Extensively.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Honesty

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted on Tumblr: Wanweird - An unhappy fate
> 
> Originally posted [here](http://queerhazeleyes.tumblr.com/post/103105786076/wanweird-chuck-hansen-pacific-rim)

If he were being honest with himself—something Chuck made a point of avoiding—he would have to admit he never expected to live to twenty-one. It was a fact of life for a Jaeger pilot, especially when you start as young as Chuck did: you clock a few good years, get some Kaiju kills under your belt, and go out with a bang. The fact that he’d lasted as long as he had was worth bragging about. And brag Chuck did. Extensively. Especially when Striker Eureka broke the Becketts’ kill record. He bragged to the Jaeger-flies and he bragged to reporters and he even bragged to anyone who would listen in the Shatterdome. And maybe he was an ass about it, and maybe he deserved Mako’s death glares and getting flipped and pinned to the ground by Raleigh, but Chuck Hansen was already a dead man walking. He had the right to throw in some swagger.

If he were being honest with himself, Chuck always had known the chances of making it back from this last-shot mission were slim at best, no matter who was watching his six. And after Cherno Alpha and the Crimson Tide went down, the odds of surviving their expedition to the Breach went straight down the drain. So really, Chuck never expected to make it back from his walk along the bottom of the Pacific. 

What he had never expected, though, was that he could be taking that walk without his father at his side. 

He may not always like his old man, but he’d also never Drifted with anyone else. If he were being honest with himself, he’d never expected to either. He’d known taking a nuke to the Breach was a suicide mission, but it was one he was willing to carry out with his father in the Jaeger with him.

If he were being honest with himself, when he stepped into Striker Eureka for what would be the last time with Stacker Pentacost as a co-pilot, he wished he could have said more of a goodbye to his dad. But that wasn’t the relationship they had; it never had been. Hansens didn’t tell each other “I love you.”

If he were being honest with himself, as he flipped the switch to detonate the payload, Chuck though about saying it anyway.


End file.
